ALT.NET, Day Two, or "How to be a domain-specific, behaviour-driven, controlling jujitsu expert"

Oct 7, 2007

The first full day of sessions is over and I'm sorry to report there was not a single mention of moonshine, although by the end of Scott Guthrie's presentation on Microsoft's MVC, I sure felt like I'd had a few jugs.

The Hillbilly doesn't do note-taking, but I seriously doubt there will be a lack of coverage on individual sessions given the audience. So you will have to be satisfied with my own little Appalachian-American take on the proceedings:

Domain-Specific Languages

This topic holds some interest for me academically but I doubt I'll see any real-world implementations of this in my immediate future. There were a lot of questions about what exactly constitutes DSLs, at least until Martin Fowler joined. And I must admit, he held himself well considering the inner turmoil he was going through. But his example domain, "Dealing with loss" was telling.

Wow! This looks fine like a greased porky-pine. There was a *lot* to like about this presentation. It was nice to see that Scott Guthrie and his team looked at existing frameworks and didn't develop this in a silo. I'm sure there will be much talk on this subject by people more qualified and verbose than I so I'll leave it at that except to say the beta is expected in six to eight weeks.

DDD Jujitsu

A scrappy affair this one was with Dave Laribee and Scott Bellware (among others) sort of butting heads on how best to implement a model. The debate was whether a function like TransferFunds for an account should reside in the Account object or in a separate service. My instinct had me on the latter side but there were good arguments from both camps.

After that was a quick wrap-up and judging from the comments from others, Microsoft still looms large with alt.netters. Much praise was given to Scott Guthrie for the new framework and when it was suggested that we shift focus from it, people simple commented on Microsoft in general.

I did meet another healthy dose of developers. And in that vein, I'll close up with a "fill in the blank" quiz. Given the following last names, fill in the first names. HINT: All answers are one or more of: Chris, Dave, or Scott